Bomba had scarcely taken a dozen steps carrying his heavy burden when the tempest broke. The rain came down in a stinging, blinding deluge that scourged him as though with whips. The wind increased to a gale, which, luckily, was at his back. No living thing could have faced it without being swept from its feet.
Bomba was swept along almost without his own volition. Head down, with the dead body of Tatuc held close to his own, he progressed more by the sense of touch than sight, heading toward a deserted native hut that he knew lay at a little distance.
The lightning cut the black of the sky with vicious thrusts. Crash after crash of thunder seemed to shake the very ground beneath the lad’s feet. But he reached the hut at last, and, climbing the prostrate deep-notched tree trunk that led to its entrance, slippery now with the rain, he deposited his lifeless burden on the floor, composed of a few rotting boards.
It was a typical native hut of the jungle. Long ago it had been deserted by its one-time tenants. It consisted of a few upright poles set in the ground, with cross supports to hold them steady. The flooring was made of split pieces of palm trunks, sagging in places.
The walls had been made of the same material, but now only two sides were left standing, the others being open to the assault of wind and weather. A light framework of thinner saplings supported the flimsy roof. This was made of the leaves of the ubussu palm, placed so that they overlapped one another.
Hundreds of creeping insects crawled slimily beneath the roof and now and then dropped upon the shoulders and head of Bomba, as he sat hunched up and brooding beside the body of the dead monkey, Tatuc, leader of the flock.
Once it was a scorpion that fell on the lad, and he was forced to act quickly to kill the creature, before it could inject into his veins the deadly poison of its bite.
For a long time Bomba sat brooding beside his dead companion. The rain swept down in torrents. The lightning crashed and the thunder roared and all nature was in pandemonium.
But the storms of the jungle, fierce while they last, are seldom of long duration. When at last the rain ceased and the last reverberating peal of thunder died away in the distance, Bomba rose with a sigh and for a few moments left Tatuc alone on the broken flooring of the hut.
Then with the machete and a sharp stick that he found near by, he dug a rude grave for his friend. The ground was soft, and the task did not take long.